Inkstravaganza

Tenfold: Celebrating 10 Years of Ink & Switch

Inkstravaganza

March 2026
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Today we’re shining a bright spotlight on recent work from our Programmable Ink research area — visualizable computation, software you can put your hands on, and a grimoire of rune stones and imagination.

For the past few years, we’ve been quietly building a holistic, malleable notebook we call PlayBook. The goal is to make something that feels every bit as good as paper & pencil for sketching and writing in your own hand. But unlike paper, PlayBook is imbued with dynamic behaviour, built out of composable pieces that let you reshape the notebook and add your own augmentations. Members of our team have been using PlayBook continuously for over two years, living inside the tool for their daily note taking, brainstorming, music composition, puzzle solving, collaborative whiteboarding, PDF marking, tutoring, and more. In this newsletter, and throughout the coming year, we’ll share more about how PlayBook was designed, how we built it, and what it now enables us to do.
Portemine
First up: Marcel Goethals is in the midst of an exploration. He suspects that propagator networks will be a useful computational substrate for PlayBook. You can use them to implement SAT and constraint solving, foundational pieces of our past Ink research. Propagators lend themselves quite naturally to visual/spatial representation, with execution visualized over time. They’d likely work well as a kind of “assembly language” that other visual programming systems could be built atop. As his experiments progress, Marcel has been publishing a series of small lab notes with motivations, findings, video clips, open questions, and other tidbits. Read more about Portemine, an exploration into propagator networks.

Gestures
Another area of ongoing work in PlayBook is our systems for handling user input. PlayBook is designed to feel like paper. It doesn’t have any on-screen GUI elements that you can accidentally tap with your finger, because paper doesn’t have that. You can comfortably rest your hands anywhere on the screen, or grip the screen with one hand while writing with the other like a clipboard. To switch between tools (such as drawing and selecting), we’ve created a special “firm press” gesture that you perform with the pen. Our focus on designing these gestures, and our desire to rapidly prototype new gestures, has led us to develop our own approach to dispatching and acting on user input events. In a recent lab note, Ivy Reese walked through the technical design of the PlayBook gesture system step by step, with comparisons to other popular approaches.
DrawDeck
Finally, we have DrawDeck. What is DrawDeck? Why is DrawDeck? Very mysterious. Perhaps there are “rune stones” you could pick up and set down, and scraps of paper you could set the stones beside. Perhaps a computational process would unfold in space and time. You could draw a cat. You could perceive the cat, or not. You might instead reach for other stones. Divination. Imagination. Perhaps the scraps of paper remember something. And from the mouth of Marcel Goethals, I directly quote, “Stones can communicate with each other through ‘dreams’.” For the sake of argument, let’s say you read more about DrawDeck, looked at some videos. Good, good. Now you never know.

What’s one more open tab?
After implementing image dithering for the new Automerge website, Ivy Reese created a little sandbox where you can play with error diffusion dither kernels in a way that feels like a board game.

Tickets are on sale now for Local-First Conf 2026. This year, in addition to two days of conference talks, there will be a special “Lab Day” hosted by Ink & Switch featuring live demos, creative experiments, and community projects — part unconference, part showcase, and shaped by the ideas that animate our community. We hope to see you there!
That brings us to the end of our special Inkstravaganza newsletter. Stay tuned for next time to hear about the flurry of activity happening in Patchwork, and reach out if you’d like to work more closely together.

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The research area highlighted by Ink & Switch focuses on visualizable computation, software that is tangible, and imaginative systems, exemplified by the development of PlayBook. PlayBook is described as a holistic and malleable notebook designed to emulate the experience of paper and pencil while incorporating dynamic behavior through composable pieces that allow users to reshape and augment the medium. Team members have utilized PlayBook extensively for diverse tasks including note-taking, brainstorming, music composition, puzzle solving, collaborative whiteboarding, and tutoring.

A key area of exploration involves the use of propagator networks as a computational substrate for PlayBook. Marcel Goethals is investigating the potential of these networks to implement foundational concepts from past Ink research, such as SAT and constraint solving. Propagator networks are inherently suited for visual and spatial representation, allowing for the visualization of execution over time, and they are envisioned as a form of assembly language upon which other visual programming systems could be constructed. Goethals is actively publishing lab notes detailing his experiments, findings, and open questions regarding propagator networks, Portemine.

In addition to the core software, the group is developing sophisticated systems for handling user input that prioritize a natural, tactile experience, rejecting accidental on-screen interactions typical of graphical user interfaces. This involves designing specific gestures, such as a unique firm press gesture performed with a pen to switch between tools like drawing and selecting. The team developed a novel approach for dispatching and acting upon user input events, driven by the need for rapid prototyping of gestures. Ivy Reese detailed the technical design of this PlayBook gesture system, comparing their approach to other established methods in the field.

Furthermore, the group explores conceptual systems such as DrawDeck, which remains mysterious in its exact definition. This concept is speculated to involve interactions between physical or imagined elements, such as rune stones and scraps of paper, suggesting a potential intersection between imagination, divination, and computational processes unfolding across space and time. Goethals suggests that these elements might communicate through "dreams," introducing a layer of speculative thinking into the research. In a related experimental context, Ivy Reese created a sandbox environment where users could interact with error diffusion dither kernels in a manner that mimics a board game.

The work continues with ongoing explorations, including the development of systems that allow for the visualization of computation, refined through avenues like the study of propagator networks, the design of physical-like user interfaces, and the conceptualization of imaginative computational structures. These efforts are supported by community engagement, notably through planned events like the Local-First Conf 2026, which will feature live demonstrations and community-shaped projects.